PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — An arresting visual display was attracting attention today on the campus of Villanova University, where students and faculty members put together a memorial to last year’s victims of gun violence in Philadelphia.

Villanova students couldn’t help but pause at the hundreds of t-shirts comprising the “Memorial to the Lost” — 288 shirts representing those who died from gunfire in Philadelphia in 2012, plus an additional 26 for those who died in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut.

“What is striking is that the suffering is not just these numbers lost but the hundreds of thousands more who have been touched by the lives of these people and who miss them. And that this is preventable,” she said.

It’s finals time, but senior communications major Grace Cipressi was helping to hammer crosses into the ground and hanging each with a t-shirt bearing the name and age of a victim.

“It’s just very harrowing because I keep getting t-shirts to put on the crosses and I keep thinking we must be done soon, and then I go into the pile and there is even more to get. It just keeps coming,” she said.

She's reported from inside a burning building, from the flight deck of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, and aboard a submarine in the Persian Gulf, was the first reporter in FBI history to participate in New Agent classes at the FBI Academy, and...